1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a digital mixer capable of programming the mixer configuration for sound signal processing, a mixer configuration editing apparatus, and a control application program to control the digital mixer.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, there is known the digital mixer capable of customizing the mixer configuration as described in non-patent document DIGITAL MIXING ENGINE DME32 Instruction Manual, YAMAHA CORPORATION, 2001. This digital mixer configures the sound signal processing module using a processor (e.g., digital signal processor (DSP)) that can operate on programs. In this manner, the sound signal processing is made available based on the mixer configuration (signal process configuration) that is created and edited through the use of an external PC (personal computer). A special-purpose mixer control program is used to create and edit the mixer configuration on the PC. That is, a user executes the mixer control program on the PC to display a mixer edit screen. The user arranges components as parts on the screen for signal processes. The user makes wire connections between the arranged components to define the input/output relationship. In this manner, the mixer configuration is created and edited. When the created mixer configuration is transferred to the digital mixer for execution, the digital mixer implements operations of the mixer configuration.
Such digital mixer makes it possible to use a plurality of scenes for each mixer configuration. Scene data is a data set of parameters used for operations according to the mixer configuration. Even though the same mixer configuration is used, the digital mixer may need to operate according to various parameter values. For this purpose, a plurality of scene data is provided and is called as needed to operate the mixer.
In related art, scene data is incidental to the mixer configuration. The scene data structure varies with mixer configurations. Therefore, there is no compatibility between scene data having different data structures corresponding to different mixer configurations. Unavailability of the compatibility causes inconvenience in various situations. For example, there may be a case of using the PC's mixer control program for minor change of the mixer configuration to slightly edit the mixer configuration currently active on the mixer engine and transferring the edited mixer configuration from the program to the mixer engine for operation. In this case, the edited mixer configuration cannot call scenes used for the mixer configuration before the minor change. When the mixer engine is available in various models, for example, the respective models generally use different scene data structures. It has been impossible to use different models' scenes for similar mixer configurations.
When the original mixer configuration is edited, it may be possible to appropriately modify the structure of scene data corresponding to the original mixer configuration so that the modified scene data can be used for the edited mixer configuration. However, it is difficult to modify the scene data structure. This is because there is unknown correspondence between scene data having different structures. That is, it is unknown which parameter in the scene data to be read as an origin should be written to which position in the scene data as a write destination. Further, the scene memory often contains many pieces of scene data. It is time-consuming to change all the scene data in accordance with the change in the mixer configuration.